This Brand Wants You To Replace Your Face Wash With Dirt

The world's first live bacteria skincare range might sound gross, but it actually works.

When it comes to skin, we’ve been conditioned to believe the cleaner the better.

There are quite literally thousands of products dedicated to cleansing, scrubbing, stripping and cleaning our faces, with chemical and physical exfoliants holding court when it comes to squeaky clean skin.

“We’ve long believed that killing bacteria is the best way to be ‘clean’ and if we are ‘clean’ that we will be healthy. More and more research is pointing to the reality that sterility might not make us healthier. In fact, ‘clean’ and ‘sterile’ likely look like two very different things,” the brand explains on its website.

Mother Dirt’s whole premise is around the fact that up until about 100 years ago, humans had a naturally occurring beneficial bacteria on our skin: Ammonia-Oxidizing Bacteria, or AOB. It’s found everywhere in nature, like rivers and lakes, and especially dirt. But between our mostly-indoor lifestyles (i.e. minimal contact with nature) and the chemistry in our cleansing products, we’ve removed them from our skin.

“When we ask people to rethink clean, we’re really questioning the overuse of products and chemicals that have stripped our microbiome of the organisms that were once inherent to it, and that protected us from our external environments,” says Jennifer Cookson, Mother Dirt’s director of research and product development.

For the uninitiated, the skin microbiome is the entire ecosystem of microorganisms that live on the skin. Research shows that some of these organisms potentially play an important role in how our skin looks, feels, and acts. By over-washing it, or exposing it to too much chemistry, we could be destabilising it, leaving our skin more susceptible to issues.

Ergo, our attempt to get rid of all bacteria – good and bad – has only messed up the skin’s ecosystem and created the opportunity for issues to arise.

And that’s where their hallmark product, the AO+ Mist Live Probiotic Spray, which contains a live culture of AOB, comes in. By applying bacteria back to your skin, you're restoring your skin to a native, healthy state.

When sprayed on your skin twice a day, it restores balance to problem, dry, oily, and sensitive skin as well as improving clarity, smoothness as well as the look and feel of dry and uneven skin.

Without going full blown white coat, AOB convert irritating components of our sweat (ammonia and urea) and turn them into by products that bring benefits to the skin (nitrite and nitric oxide). Nitrite helps keep bad bacteria in check and nitric oxide is an antioxidant that helps calm and soothe the skin. This action can help restore balance to the skin's ecosystem and in turn reduce dependence on conventional products like soaps, moisturisers, and deodorants.

“As the name states, it takes the irritating components found in sweat and converts them into beneficial components for the skin, predominantly nitrite, nitrate, and nitric oxide. We refer to AOB as a peace-keeper bacteria for this very reason.”

The range also includes a facial cleanser, body wash, shampoo, moisturiser, body oil and shave butter, all bolstered with good germs.

Best of all? AOB are truly good bacteria with no downside and decades of science to prove it, confirms Cookson.

“There have never been any reports of illness or disease related to AOB. They're naturally regulated by the amount of sweat the body produces. If there is not enough food for all the AOBs in a given area, they will die. This regulation mechanism by your own sweat production is one of the many things that makes them incapable of causing an infection.”

Like the probiotic supplements you swallow each morning, the spray version keeps best in the fridge too – something to keep in mind before you buy a bottle.

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